Ask ChatGPT to recommend accounting software for a 20-person marketing agency, and it will name three tools without hesitation. If your product ranks on page one of Google for that exact query but never shows up in that answer, no amount of traditional SEO work fixes it.
That visibility gap is why searches for “GEO agency” and “LLM SEO agency” have climbed sharply this year. It’s also why the market filled up fast with vendors who added “AI search optimization” to an existing SEO service list without changing much else underneath it.
Choosing an AI search optimization agency, whether it calls itself GEO, LLM SEO, or something else, means learning to separate providers that changed their actual methodology from ones that changed their pitch deck. That distinction matters more than any feature checklist, because GEO is still young enough that there’s no shared certification, no agreed-upon ranking algorithm, and no industry body policing claims.
What a GEO Agency Actually Does (and How It Differs From an SEO Agency)
Generative Engine Optimization, usually shortened to GEO, is the practice of increasing the probability that an AI system like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or Google AI Overviews mentions, cites, or accurately describes your brand when someone asks a relevant question. Some vendors call the same work “LLM SEO,” “AI search optimization,” or “answer engine optimization (AEO).” The terminology varies more than the underlying job.
Traditional SEO optimizes for a fixed, verifiable outcome. Your URL either ranks third for a keyword or it doesn’t, and a rank tracker confirms it instantly. GEO optimizes for something more probabilistic: whether a language model, across many possible phrasings of a similar question, tends to surface your brand at all. Two people asking the same AI engine a nearly identical question can get different answers on the same day.
That single difference explains most of the confusion buyers walk into. An SEO agency can hand you a rank report with a number in a specific slot. A GEO agency should be able to show you a trend across a representative set of real questions, not a single “you’re now ranked #1” screenshot, because that screenshot doesn’t really exist in the same way.
What Services a Legitimate GEO or LLM SEO Agency Should Offer
A useful test when comparing proposals: strip out the acronyms and see what’s actually being delivered. Real generative engine optimization services generally include a handful of concrete, checkable pieces of work.
Baseline visibility auditing. The agency runs a set of real customer questions, not just your brand name, through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews to see where you currently stand against named competitors.
Crawler and technical access checks. This is a good place to separate agencies that understand the infrastructure from ones repeating buzzwords. AI systems rely on different bots for different jobs, and they don’t all control the same thing. GPTBot handles OpenAI’s model training crawl, and OAI-SearchBot powers ChatGPT’s live search feature, so blocking either one changes what ChatGPT can see or cite from your site. Google-Extended is narrower than most vendors imply: per Google’s own documentation, it only lets you opt out of having your content used to train and ground the Gemini app and Vertex AI models. It has no effect on Google AI Overviews, which pull from whatever Google has already indexed through standard Googlebot crawling, the same eligibility bar as regular search results. An agency that describes Google-Extended as a switch for AI Overviews visibility is repeating a myth, not reading the source.
Content restructuring for extractability. This means rewriting pages so a model can lift a clean, self-contained answer: direct definition sentences, scannable lists, and content that doesn’t bury the useful part three paragraphs into a narrative intro.
Citation-source analysis. Good providers can show you which sources a model is currently pulling from when it answers questions in your category, and where the gaps are that your content could fill.
Ongoing prompt tracking, not a one-time snapshot. Since AI answers shift with model updates and even time of day, a single audit tells you almost nothing about trend. The service should include recurring measurement against a fixed, documented set of prompts.
If a proposal skips straight from “we’ll do keyword research” to “you’ll rank in ChatGPT,” ask what happens in between. That’s usually where the real GEO work is supposed to live.
GEO Services vs. Traditional SEO Services: Where the Line Really Is
Plenty of agencies now market themselves as an “AI search marketing agency” or a “GEO consultant” while running the exact same playbook they used for Google rankings five years ago. That’s not automatically a scam. Some SEO fundamentals genuinely carry over: clear site structure, authoritative content, and strong entity signals help in both worlds.
But a few things don’t transfer cleanly. Backlink volume, a heavily weighted SEO signal, has a much less predictable relationship with AI citation. Domain age matters less than whether your content answers the specific question being asked in a way the model can lift cleanly.
And because there’s no public GEO ranking algorithm to reverse-engineer, no agency, including ones that have been doing this since ChatGPT first added browsing, can hand you a formula with the certainty an SEO agency can hand you Google’s documented ranking factors. That’s the point to hold onto when a sales call starts sounding too confident.
How to Vet an AI Visibility Agency Before You Sign Anything
A short set of direct questions tends to separate substance from a rebranded SEO retainer faster than any case study slide.
Ask which AI engines they actually track, and ask to see the real prompts behind a visibility number, not just a dashboard screenshot. A number without the underlying question set isn’t verifiable.
Ask how they distinguish a citation (your source is linked or named), a mention (your brand appears in the text), and a favorable position (you’re the first or only recommendation) inside an AI answer. Agencies that use these terms interchangeably usually haven’t built real measurement infrastructure yet.
Ask for a redacted example of what a client’s report looked like at 30 days versus 90 days. Citation data is noisy day to day, and category-level shifts almost always take longer to settle than a single sprint, so the 30-day-versus-90-day comparison is the real test, not a specific number of weeks anyone promises you upfront. Agencies and in-house teams who’ve actually run these programs tend to describe early progress in terms of infrastructure completed, crawler access confirmed, schema deployed, baseline audit done, rather than a visibility score jumping in the first few days. If someone promises meaningful citation movement inside two weeks, ask what exactly they’re measuring that fast.
Ask what they do when a model gets an important fact about your brand wrong. A real provider has a process for flagging and correcting inaccurate AI answers about pricing, features, or positioning. A vendor who hasn’t thought about this hasn’t run enough live campaigns to hit the problem yet.
Quick Answers on GEO, LLM SEO, and AI Search Marketing Agencies
Is a “ChatGPT SEO agency” different from a GEO agency?
Not meaningfully. “ChatGPT SEO agency” is usually a narrower marketing term for the same generative engine optimization work, sometimes used by vendors emphasizing one platform. Ask whether they also track Gemini, Perplexity, and AI Overviews, since a visibility gap rarely shows up on only one engine.
What do “LLM optimization services” typically include?
In practice, LLM optimization services cover the same core work as GEO: visibility auditing across AI engines, technical crawler access, content restructured for citation, and ongoing prompt-based tracking. The name changes more often than the deliverables.
Is a generative engine optimization agency worth it if I already have an SEO agency?
It depends on whether your current agency can show you AI-engine-specific tracking and citation analysis, not just adapted keyword reports. Some SEO agencies have built real GEO capability in-house; others have only added the term to their website.
Three Ways to Tell a Real GEO Vendor From a Sales Pitch
Three checks hold up across almost every proposal you’ll receive this year.
Falsifiable methodology. Can they explain their measurement approach in specific, checkable terms, meaning the exact prompt set, which model versions, and how often they re-test, rather than handing you a single proprietary “visibility score” with no visible math behind it?
Honesty about probabilistic outcomes. Do they openly acknowledge that AI search ranking is probabilistic and still an early, evolving field, instead of promising guaranteed citations or a fixed position in a specific model’s answers? Anyone offering that guarantee is either overselling or doesn’t understand how these systems actually work.
Verifiable interim milestones. Do they give you checkpoints you can confirm yourself, like confirmed crawler access, deployed schema, a completed citation-source audit, or a documented share-of-voice trendline, instead of asking you to wait months for one big number with nothing to check along the way?
An agency that passes all three is worth a serious conversation. One that dodges even one of them is worth a harder look before you sign.
Curious how your brand shows up in AI search right now?
Topify tracks and improves brand visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Want to run the analysis yourself, or have a team run GEO and SEO for you end to end?
